Dream, recipe, and Topic 7: vidding questions
Odd day.
Dozed after waking to footsteps upstairs, and had a dream about a group of people led by Vin Diesel who were composting children. Like, there was this whole camp where kids were delivered, including a shipping crate full of them already half-dead from living in their own filth without ventilation for days. This must have been in the mop-up phase of the camp, because the people running it were trying to clear everything out. A few kids were trying to escape or had escaped, including one young woman dressed in a dark blue hooded uniform that was from the earliest days of the camp, and at least one other in regular clothes who just took off across the clearing for the woods at the edge while no one, they hoped, was looking. Jeez, it sounds horrific to write it up like that. At the time, it was just a thing that was happening. One girl hid in a room that was my childhood bedroom by lifting herself onto the top shelf of the closet by the lintel like a pull-up, realized that she could be easily seen, and hastily shoved a folded blanket between her body and the top of the door. I was the girl. Vin Diesel found her/me and said, reasonably enough for a prison guard, something about how the punishment would be eight somethings but he'd go halvsies with her and only do four if she'd just give in. She/I said, calmly, Okay. He seemed taken aback. That was that.
*shrug*
Today marked the end of my three-month probation period at work. I had a good review and was not fired. (I was not worried since my performance has been fine and people like me, but still. Not being on probation is a relief in the current financial climate. If anyone in the office had had to be cut to save money, it would have been me.) (Not to say that fear isn't still there; it's just harder to let someone go after they're off probation.)
.
Good, easy soup recipe, adapted from my new everything-chicken cookbook: Dice and sauté two small onions. When soft and beginning to brown, add a quart of chicken or vegetable broth. Grate a couple of zucchini or summer squash; add to the pot and boil for ~15 minutes. You can also add small pasta at the time you add the vegetables. At the end, drizzle in two eggs or egg whites and lemon juice to taste. Mm. Looks like it makes three bowls' worth.
.
Let's answer some vidding questions from alizarin_nyc: "What do you use for media when starting a vid? Do you rip DVDs, convert .avi files or what? What editing software do you use and why? What is the next thing you want to learn/try in writing or vidding?"
1) I tend to rip DVDs. Yay DMCA exemption. DVD Decrypter works well, but I'll switch to AnyDVD if DVD Decrypter can't break the encryption on a newer disc that I need the first chapter of (I'm looking at you, Star Trek Reboot). On a few occasions I've used AVI files or MPEGs. They don't tend to be as high quality, the way I acquire them, so they're only for vids where either that doesn't matter ( Satisfaction, Humping Robot vid) or I don't have time or resources to get better-quality source (Starships!).
2) I use Adobe Premiere to edit, because that's the program I first learned back in the late '90s/early '00s and it does everything I need and way more. I've used other programs, like Final Cut Pro and Windows Movie Maker, but PCs come more naturally to me (re: Final Cut) and Movie Maker is the worst and should only be considered because it's free. I was fortunate to be able to get an educational license for the Adobe production suite so it only cost half of way too much.
3a) The next concrete thing I want to learn in vidding is to do precise motion of a JPEG over video footage so I can finish this $%#$^&! SGA vid from four years ago enough to amnesty-post it. A photo of John Sheppard's face needs to go on an easel over a scene from the show while the camera moves one way and then another. TBD whether that will involve AfterEffects, Premiere special effects or Photoshop. Whatever the answer is, it promises to be painstaking.
3b) The real next thing I want to learn in vidding is to better create my own clip pacing that is less a slave to the music. That is to say, I think what vidders call "musicality" is of the utmost importance and I don't want to ignore or mis-time cues in the song to visuals, but I'd like to develop more experience and more confidence in varying the lengths of clips and sequences so they don't always cut on beats or lyrics the same way throughout a particular vid. It feels like I'm always cutting on beats or lyrics with a rhythm that establishes itself as I lay the first clips down on the timeline in a vid and I can't pull out of it thereafter. This is something that is vexing me again recently, with my Festivid. I feel this kind of thing should be a choice instead of like acquiescing to "the only solution" because of technical/artistic limitation. Like an inversion of that writers' mantra where if you break the rules of grammar you'd better be doing so for a purpose, not because you don't know what they are.
The vid where I was able to best break free of the song's beats (while still interacting with them--Lord help us all, I almost used the word "discourse") was Long Night's Journey Into Day, and it's still the one I view as my most successful, editing skills-wise. In a way that's different from the sort of editing I did in, say, Starships!, which was more about seeking out patterns and a certain energy across sources.
...I don't know if I articulated that well at all.
4) That's a good question about what I might want to learn next in writing. Will have to get back to you on that. As compared to video editing, fiction writing is a thing that comes so unconsciously to me -- not always easily, just instinctively rather than as a series of technical steps -- that it's hard for me to approach and understand it as a craft. (I used to think that was something to brag about, but the more I press up against the boundaries of what doesn't come naturally to me and what I haven't been educated about, and the more I look back on many of the fics I've written and listen to others who do understand the technical elements of putting together effective stories and characters, like the more I appreciate that relying on instinct alone can also be a limitation.)
Dozed after waking to footsteps upstairs, and had a dream about a group of people led by Vin Diesel who were composting children. Like, there was this whole camp where kids were delivered, including a shipping crate full of them already half-dead from living in their own filth without ventilation for days. This must have been in the mop-up phase of the camp, because the people running it were trying to clear everything out. A few kids were trying to escape or had escaped, including one young woman dressed in a dark blue hooded uniform that was from the earliest days of the camp, and at least one other in regular clothes who just took off across the clearing for the woods at the edge while no one, they hoped, was looking. Jeez, it sounds horrific to write it up like that. At the time, it was just a thing that was happening. One girl hid in a room that was my childhood bedroom by lifting herself onto the top shelf of the closet by the lintel like a pull-up, realized that she could be easily seen, and hastily shoved a folded blanket between her body and the top of the door. I was the girl. Vin Diesel found her/me and said, reasonably enough for a prison guard, something about how the punishment would be eight somethings but he'd go halvsies with her and only do four if she'd just give in. She/I said, calmly, Okay. He seemed taken aback. That was that.
*shrug*
Today marked the end of my three-month probation period at work. I had a good review and was not fired. (I was not worried since my performance has been fine and people like me, but still. Not being on probation is a relief in the current financial climate. If anyone in the office had had to be cut to save money, it would have been me.) (Not to say that fear isn't still there; it's just harder to let someone go after they're off probation.)
.
Good, easy soup recipe, adapted from my new everything-chicken cookbook: Dice and sauté two small onions. When soft and beginning to brown, add a quart of chicken or vegetable broth. Grate a couple of zucchini or summer squash; add to the pot and boil for ~15 minutes. You can also add small pasta at the time you add the vegetables. At the end, drizzle in two eggs or egg whites and lemon juice to taste. Mm. Looks like it makes three bowls' worth.
.
Let's answer some vidding questions from alizarin_nyc: "What do you use for media when starting a vid? Do you rip DVDs, convert .avi files or what? What editing software do you use and why? What is the next thing you want to learn/try in writing or vidding?"
1) I tend to rip DVDs. Yay DMCA exemption. DVD Decrypter works well, but I'll switch to AnyDVD if DVD Decrypter can't break the encryption on a newer disc that I need the first chapter of (I'm looking at you, Star Trek Reboot). On a few occasions I've used AVI files or MPEGs. They don't tend to be as high quality, the way I acquire them, so they're only for vids where either that doesn't matter ( Satisfaction, Humping Robot vid) or I don't have time or resources to get better-quality source (Starships!).
2) I use Adobe Premiere to edit, because that's the program I first learned back in the late '90s/early '00s and it does everything I need and way more. I've used other programs, like Final Cut Pro and Windows Movie Maker, but PCs come more naturally to me (re: Final Cut) and Movie Maker is the worst and should only be considered because it's free. I was fortunate to be able to get an educational license for the Adobe production suite so it only cost half of way too much.
3a) The next concrete thing I want to learn in vidding is to do precise motion of a JPEG over video footage so I can finish this $%#$^&! SGA vid from four years ago enough to amnesty-post it. A photo of John Sheppard's face needs to go on an easel over a scene from the show while the camera moves one way and then another. TBD whether that will involve AfterEffects, Premiere special effects or Photoshop. Whatever the answer is, it promises to be painstaking.
3b) The real next thing I want to learn in vidding is to better create my own clip pacing that is less a slave to the music. That is to say, I think what vidders call "musicality" is of the utmost importance and I don't want to ignore or mis-time cues in the song to visuals, but I'd like to develop more experience and more confidence in varying the lengths of clips and sequences so they don't always cut on beats or lyrics the same way throughout a particular vid. It feels like I'm always cutting on beats or lyrics with a rhythm that establishes itself as I lay the first clips down on the timeline in a vid and I can't pull out of it thereafter. This is something that is vexing me again recently, with my Festivid. I feel this kind of thing should be a choice instead of like acquiescing to "the only solution" because of technical/artistic limitation. Like an inversion of that writers' mantra where if you break the rules of grammar you'd better be doing so for a purpose, not because you don't know what they are.
The vid where I was able to best break free of the song's beats (while still interacting with them--Lord help us all, I almost used the word "discourse") was Long Night's Journey Into Day, and it's still the one I view as my most successful, editing skills-wise. In a way that's different from the sort of editing I did in, say, Starships!, which was more about seeking out patterns and a certain energy across sources.
...I don't know if I articulated that well at all.
4) That's a good question about what I might want to learn next in writing. Will have to get back to you on that. As compared to video editing, fiction writing is a thing that comes so unconsciously to me -- not always easily, just instinctively rather than as a series of technical steps -- that it's hard for me to approach and understand it as a craft. (I used to think that was something to brag about, but the more I press up against the boundaries of what doesn't come naturally to me and what I haven't been educated about, and the more I look back on many of the fics I've written and listen to others who do understand the technical elements of putting together effective stories and characters, like the more I appreciate that relying on instinct alone can also be a limitation.)